The BBC has published another lesson in how bourgeois propaganda works: not by openly demanding that workers be made poorer, but by presenting attacks on living standards as the unavoidable conclusions of serious economic analysis.
The article reports warnings from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research that Prime Minister Andy Burnham will have to raise taxes or cut spending to pay for cheaper electricity, a restored £2 bus fare cap and increased defence commitments. From the beginning, the reader is placed inside a narrow argument in which the only question is how working people should pay.
Stephen Millard, Niesr’s deputy director for macroeconomics, said: “There’s clearly no scope for increasing borrowing, so it is about choices.” The BBC then allowed the think tank to define those choices: cut welfare, weaken the pension triple lock, remove VAT exemptions, reform council tax and eventually raise income tax.
“People have talked a lot about the welfare bill – that is an obvious place to look,” Millard said. It’s only “obvious” once the interests of capital have been removed from the discussion. The possibility of raising taxes on corporate profits, accumulated wealth or the incomes of the very rich was excluded by omission. So was any serious challenge to military spending.
This is the ideological work performed by supposedly neutral economic reporting. Political decisions that protect the ruling class are treated as fixed facts, while the incomes and services relied upon by workers are presented as variables that can be adjusted. The pensioner, the disabled person, the bus passenger and the income tax payer are all invited to compete over who should bear the cost. The owners of Britain’s wealth barely appear.
The BBC doesn’t need to tell its audience directly that welfare should be cut. It can simply quote a respectable think tank calling welfare “an obvious place to look”, surround the claim with the language of fiscal responsibility and decline to ask why corporate wealth is not an equally obvious target. A class position is then made to look like economic common sense.
The same method is used to defend the wider priorities of the British state. Inflation caused by the Iran war is presented as an external pressure on the public finances, not as a consequence of imperialist policy. Defence spending remains beyond meaningful scrutiny, even as cheaper energy and bus fares are treated as promises that must be “paid for” through sacrifice elsewhere.
The Treasury reinforced this framing by declaring that “Fiscal discipline is the bedrock of economic stability and national security.” In the language of bourgeois politics, fiscal discipline means protecting creditors, reassuring financial markets and preserving the state’s ability to wage war. Spending that serves capital and imperialism is treated as necessary. Spending that improves working-class life must constantly justify its existence.
The BBC’s role is to make these class priorities appear natural. By choosing which experts to centre, which options to mention and which possibilities to leave out, it narrows political debate before the audience has even begun to consider the issue. Workers are told there is no money, then shown a menu of ways they can be made to pay.
There are always choices. Britain can cut welfare, weaken pensions and raise taxes on workers. It can also tax corporate profits and private wealth, take essential industries out of the hands of profiteers and abandon costly imperialist commitments. The BBC’s propaganda lies in presenting only the first set of choices as realistic.
